Saturday, 24 November 2012

Monday felt like a good day for the ancient history of women past their youth who exert societal influence. I was thrilled to be Chris Evans’ ‘Mystery Guest’ on BBC Radio 2, invited to explain the identity of the ’16 Vestal Virgins’ in Procol Harum’s classic song ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’. I wish I'd had time to add that ‘procol harum’ is an approximate and mis-spelt (procul would be correct) Latin
translation of the 1960s slogan FAR OUT.

To inflame further my enthusiasm for ancient priestly women,
I received advance copies of my labour-of-love Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris (OUP New York), a book-length
harangue about the most important priestess--ever--of the girl-goddess Artemis/Diana.

Forget it, girls.

But on Tuesday, alas, uppity females aspiring to leadership got their usual come- uppance. The Church of England voted to exclude women from even
diocese-level authority. This took me right back to my Anglican childhood when
I was told I couldn’t sing in the church choir because, as a girl, my voice was
‘impure’. Tell that to ancient female choruses for Artemis.

Poster for Trojan Women currently at the Gate

The same evening I got even more depressed about the current
state of women in civic and spiritual leadership, at a largely excellent
adaptation of Euripides’ Trojan Women in
London (the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill). Acidic, fresh, and animated, the (fine
poet) Caroline Bird’s (wholly unpoetic) script made great arguments in support
of teenage girls, psychotic females, and young mothers perinatally. But it collapsed
completely in feminist terms when it came to Hecuba. She was dumbed down, lost all her authority, turned into a total snob and made insensitive to her daughter and daughter-in-law.

In the original, Euripidean Trojan
Women,however,Hecuba offers THE SOLE ROLE INWORLD THEATRE UNTIL
BRECHT (notwithstanding Ibsen) where a non-villainous female is given the psychological stature and eloquence
equivalent to e.g. Shakespeare’s Lear. Full stop.
End of. Treat her with respect!

Hollywood blacklists Hecuba

I still have not recovered from Wolfgang Petersen’s
bewildering decision to delete altogether the unforgettable Iliadic Hecuba from his Brad-Pitt-Fest Troy (2005): Peter O'Toole, as a mysteriously single King Priam, was left pathetically 'throne alone'.

So when it comes to Hecuba’s
other great literary manifestation, in Euripides’ darkest tragedy, as the
magnificent, bereaved leader of Troy in its last hours and last rituals, please could
young feminists be careful? Do we really want to take all the tragic heroism
out of the only middle-aged woman that ancient Mediterranean literature ever took
with any degree of seriousness? I understand and sympathise with all young Amazons' need to Kill the Mother, but it was the Fathers,
surely, who were and still are really responsible for destroying Troy?

Saturday, 17 November 2012

Pleased as I am that the U.S presidential elections were won
by a cool person who seems to respect women instead of an uncool
one who doesn’t, it is becoming difficult to take elections
seriously. This week the UK experienced the
pitiful fiasco of our first elections for the Kafkaesque new office of ‘Police
Commissioner’, a poll which attracted less than 15 per cent of the vote and cost
a staggering £100 million to administer.

Herodotus, election commentator

I have always felt that ‘democracy’ as currently defined is
a collective hallucination. It is the label we give to constitutions which sign
up to an inhumane economic system, while allowing most adults periodically to
insert in a box a piece of paper which names one power-crazed person who won’t
rock any boats in preference to another. The voter usually chooses after being ‘persuaded’
by a daft and expensive advertisement financed by some vested interest.

So this week I compensated myself for the state of the world
by burying myself in the best account of an election in world literature, to be
found in book 3 of the ‘Father of History’, the classical writer Herodotus. I
have been enthralled by his vivid description of the procedure by which Darius
I, a soldier and the son of a Persian civil servant, in 522 BC got himself ‘elected’
to the throne of the King of Kings. I now suggest we could imitate it to our
collective advantage.

Rational Grounds for Voting Choice

After the scuffles surrounding the end of his lunatic predecessor's
reign, Darius and several other Persian alpha males decided that the crown
should go to the one whose horse neighed first the very next morning. Darius decided
to ‘fix’ the election and talk to his household groom. This slave realised that
a bit of testosterone would do the trick, and made sure that a mare which
Darius’ stallion fancied was tied up at the meeting-place. Sure enough, Darius’
horse neighed first in delight at her fragrance, and Darius ascended the
throne.

Darius won because he possessed the same cocktail of qualifications
for political power which still apply: cynical opportunism, willingness to use corrupt
means to manipulate the election, access through personal wealth to the
services of a low-status person with more brains than he possessed himself, and
a crude understanding of the most animal sexual instincts (although Petraeus
was admittedly never elected).

Darius I, consummate election rigger

If candidates for power were required to ride horses to elections,
it would guarantee a turnout of more than fifteen per cent of the
voters (I write as one whose family has suffered delays all week caused by cars
queuing to enter the Cheltenham Races
rather than Cheltenham Police Commissioner polling booths). Waiting to see which equine
brayed first would be no less rational than the reasons why most people decide
to vote one way or another. If we stop pretending
that we live in a society where the people (demos) really wield the sovereign
power (kratos), we can at last feel free properly to enjoy neighing competitions again.

Sunday, 11 November 2012

A full-time post is currently being advertised at Eton
College for a Dining Room Assistant. The wages amount to £15,272 a year. The annual fees
for this school are currently £32,067. I wonder what it feels like
scraping the used plates of teenage boys whose education alone costs more than twice your
annual income?

As it happens, £15,000 is the threshold under which a family
of four officially enters ‘severe poverty’ (i.e. must choosebetween ‘eating and
heating’), now endured by 1.8 British children, according to Save The Children UK.

God's Etonian Oil Man, Justin Welby

Speaking of Eton, I would like to be able to keep an open mind about Justin Welby, the Etonian and former oil executivewho is to become the new Archbishop of
Canterbury. Perhaps now he has completed
his meteoric rise to the top of his second career ladder, he will (a) stop
being daft about gay marriage and (b) acknowledge the imperative of supporting the poor so emphatically stated in the New Testament, which, as a fervent Evangelist, he should be taking
seriously.Although I am myself a
longstanding secularist, if not quite atheist, I can still have my breath taken
away by the overwhelming insistence of the working-class hero of the gospels on
the immorality of accumulating large wealth when other humans live in poverty.

F. Bronnikov, 'Death of Lazarus' (1886)

One of my earliest memories, from Sunday School, is Luke’s
story of Lazarus and the Rich Man ('Dives').Destitute
and hungry, his sores licked by dogs, Lazarus died at the door of Dives, ‘who
was clothed in purple and fine linen and dined sumptuously every day’. (I am sure people have historically also died of hunger near enough Eton College dining room).But guess who won the moral victory and ended upin the Bosom of Abraham? It certainly wasn’t the rich one.

Christian capitalists have always had problems with Lazarus,
along with Jesus of Nazareth’s exquisite comparison, also reported in the gospel of Luke, of the rich man’s chances of accessing
heaven with those of a camel trying to get through the eye of a needle. I recently
spoke to a Christian investment banker whosuffers from a guilty conscience and pointed
me to the Christian portfolio inSTOXX Faith-based Indiceswhich
‘offer investors access to companies that act in line with various religious values’.When I looked them up I laughed for an hour.
They include such palpable corporate
villains as HSBC, BP, Nestlé, Royal Dutch Shell and GlaxoSmithKline.

What worries me about Welby is that, despite a few routine displays
of anti-greed rhetoric, he has already proved that he is not expected to rock
the plutocratic boat in any fundamental
way by getting himself appointed to the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards.
How convenient that an embodiment of piety in a funny hat is available to lend
some cosmetic appearance of Integrity and Virtue to a national enquiry
ostensibly investigating just how low bankers have recently sunk. Before I give him the benefit of the doubt (and I would like to if only because his wife is a Classics teacher), Ichallenge him to identify lodgings anywhere near Eton, in the rich residential area of Windsor, cheap enough to allow him to work there on a
Dining Room Assistant’s pay.

Saturday, 3 November 2012

The fourth of November means that we can try to forget
that the rich and privately educated have taken over in the UK, and may be
about to crown the plutocrat Mitt Romney in the USA. This is the day when the
Romans officially opened the ‘Plebeian Games’. The Ludi Plebeii ran every
4-17 November, and featured day after day of
exciting races at the circus and
drinking sessions. The games were then
followed by three more days of
entertaining markets.

The primal gods the plebeians favoured at their festivals were
Ceres, provider of bread, and Father Liber, the Dionysiac god of wine and
liberty. An exemplary ‘Plebeian Games’ carousal constitutes the fifth act of
Plautus’ Latin comedy Stichus, which
was actually performed for a lower-class audience at the Plebeian Games in 200
BC. Three slaves, who have got hold of a barrel of wine from Samos, hold competitions in drinking, dancing
and kissing.

'Let's Go to the Ludi Plebeii!'

The Plebeian Games were some of the oldest in the Roman
calendar. One ancient scholar said that they were first established to celebrate the
day when the plebeians won their liberty during the days of the early Republic. What’s
not to like?

The focus on liberty at the Plebeian Games would
surely make restoring them every November a better way of getting through this
most depressing of months than enduring the Anglo-Saxon festivals currently on
offer. In the USA, ‘Thanksgiving’ is dreaded by many Native
Americans, who see it as a day to mourn rather than feel gratitude. In the UK, we annually become
pyromaniacs on November 5, ‘Bonfire night’. What we are actually
celebrating is less the failureof a plot
to blow up the House of Lords than the execution by torture of
several Roman Catholics.

Lest I seem to have become obsessed with things plebeian
since Andrew Mitchell, the Tory politician, was accused of calling police officers ‘plebs’, this will be my last
statement about him until he next loses his temper. But this may be as soon as
next Thursday, when he has been summoned togive evidence to the parliamentary International Development Committee.
The committee is curious about a financial grant Mitchell made in an odd hurry
on the very last day he held the office of Secretary for International
Development. The grant was made to the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, whose
human rights record is sounding increasingly creaky.

'Must I answer to someone who went to Comprehensive School?'

Two members of the committee Mitchell faces are indisputably ‘plebeian’ (the Scottish
MP Michael McCann and Richard Burden, Liverpudlian MP for Birmingham
Northfield).If, on Thursday, Mitchell has been for ‘a
large curry’ at the expensive Westminster Cinnamon Club, as he had before his
altercation with the police, then we may be treated to a display of
verbal fireworks, in the form of class-based insults. Meanwhile, roll
out the barrel, and declare the 2012 Ludi
Plebeii open!